. In Geneva and
Holland clergymen advocated the practice of vaccination from their
pulpits; in some of the Latin countries religious processions were
formed for receiving vaccination; Jenner's birthday was celebrated as
a feast in Germany; and the first child vaccinated in Russia was named
"Vaccinov" and educated at public expense. In six years the discovery
had penetrated to the most remote corners of civilization; it had even
reached some savage nations. And in a few years small-pox had fallen
from the position of the most dreaded of all diseases to that of being
practically the only disease for which a sure and easy preventive was
known.

Honors were showered upon Jenner from the Old and the New World, and
even Napoleon, the bitter hater of the English, was among the others who
honored his name. On one occasion Jenner applied to the Emperor for the
release of certain Englishmen detained in France. The petition was about
to be rejected when the name of the petitioner was mentioned. "Ah," said
Napoleon, "we can refuse nothing to that name!"

It is difficult for us of to-day clearly to conceive the greatness of
Jenner's triumph, for we can only vaguely realize what a ruthless and
ever-present scourge smallpox had been to all previous generations of
men since history began. Despite all efforts to check it by medication
and by direct inoculation, it swept now and then over the earth as an
all-devastating pestilence, and year by year it claimed one-tenth of
all the beings in Christendom by death as its average quota of victims.
"From small-pox and love but few remain free," ran the old saw. A pitted
face was almost as much a matter of course a hundred years ago as a
smooth one is to-day.

Little wonder, then, that the world gave eager acceptance to Jenner's
discovery. No urging was needed to induce the majority to give it trial;
passengers on a burning ship do not hold aloof from the life-boats. Rich
and poor, high and low, sought succor in vaccination and blessed the
name of their deliverer. Of all the great names that were before the
world in the closing days of the century, there was perhaps no other one
at once so widely known and so uniformly reverenced as that of the great
English physician Edward Jenner. Surely there was no other one that
should be recalled with greater gratitude by posterity.

VIII. NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE

PHYSICAL DIAGNOSIS

Although Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul, was not lack